“The Golden Compass”, Lacking a Moral One

Monday, November 5th, 2007 at
2:15 pm

The movie, “The Golden Compass”, is essentially a moral compass that points south instead of north. As mentioned here before, author Philip Pullman, from who’s books “His Dark Materials” the movie comes from, is distinctly anti-religious. As such, the movie, while it is marketed to the same crowd as The Chronicles of Narnia, seeks to deconstruct religion in the eyes of the kids.

Not content with the subtleties of allegory, Pullman’s movie involved the church directly, and depicts it as willing to kidnap and experiment on children in trying to determine if a particular substance is actually Original Sin. He blurs the idea of a daemon as simply the human soul that manifests itself, in some of the universes in his story, as an animal that stays with the human. Ultimately, in the trilogy, the God figure is killed. Christians will immediately see the difference and the problem with one character’s goal of establishing a Republic of Heaven to rival God’s Kingdom of Heaven.

Even though it sounds like the anti-religious themes are being downplayed in the movie, the movie inevitably spurs book sales, which is where the real issues are. I would ask Christians not to put this movie on their holiday schedule. While the controversy will no doubt increase some ticket sales, I’m hoping that the dollars withheld by others will more than offset that.

(Information on this can be found at Wikipedia here and here. A review of the books from a Christian who really wanted to like it can be found at Journeyman. The original press release by the Catholic League can be found here.)

Well, I think it’s just as likely that the watering down was done by the studio to supposedly get more Christians to go see it, i.e. a purely monetary motive. What they failed to realize it that it’s not the movie that is the big problem, it’s the books.

And of course there is the time-tested value of controversy surrounding anything, and making an issue of watering it down would get it more attention. I suppose one can ascribe what one likes to the real motives of the studio, which may be legion.

I am in the same boat as Mark T. We saw the preview at Bee Movie and I thought it looked very Narniaesque. Glad it’s being debunked. Intersting that this month’s edition of The Atlantic has an article on the movie entitled “How Hollywood Saved God.” Although I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, the title makes me a bit skeptical.